Photo of Deron L. Wade

Deron Wade is a first-chair trial lawyer with a diverse civil trial and litigation practice. He serves as lead trial counsel in complex product liability, commercial, and energy industry matters. For more than 20 years, Mr. Wade has provided trusted counsel and superior representation to major automobile manufacturers in mass tort, wrongful death and catastrophic injury in alleged product-defect lawsuits.  This practice has expanded geographically to include encompass cases throughout Texas, as well as matters in California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maine.  Dykema’s national scope gives Mr. Wade the opportunity to incorporate diverse, high-performing attorneys from the firm’s other offices into the case team.

Mr. Wade also has longstanding relationships and representations in the regulated utility and midstream space.  He represents regulated electric utility and midstream companies as trial counsel in a wide variety of personal injury, commercial, breach of contract, and property damage matters, including high-risk, high-exposure litigation.  In fact, Mr. Wade’s most recent trial success was a 2018 unanimous jury win in Harris County, Texas as plaintiff’s counsel for a midstream company whose delivery contracts were materially breached by a customer.  The jury returned a liability finding in favor of Mr. Wade’s client and awarded the exact amount of damages Mr. Wade’s sought in closing argument.  The defendant tried to evade the judgment, prompting the case team to engage in extensive extra-jurisdictional proceedings to collect the award.

The recent Tesla fire in Houston reportedly took four-plus hours to extinguish completely because of continued flareups. This highlights some of the challenges faced by auto manufacturers (and fire departments) as electric vehicles start to take over the roads, including unique issues related to lithium-ion fires.  Dykema attorneys Deron Wade, Jeff Cox and Rebekah Hudgins recently presented a litigation update addressing: “How Going All Electric May Impact the Future of Fire Litigation” (PowerPoint Slides – starting on Slide 21). The first portion of the update addressed: “A Discussion of Jury Selection and Juror Attitudes in the Post-COVID World.”
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